You tell ‘em, Nietzsche.
Is wanting a symptom of unhappiness?
I’ve been asking myself this question since I finished my latest binge-read, The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig.
(That’s a lie. This question has lived rent-free in my consciousness for years. The book simply brought this question once again to the surface.)
The teachings of Buddhism would suggest so — that to want is to suffer. They see desire as the root of all suffering. And Nirvana, the ultimate state of being, specifically requires the absence of wanting.
Conversely, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza saw wanting as a fundamental component of the human condition. "Desire is the very essence of man,” he wrote, “insofar as it is conceived to be determined, from any given affection of it, to do something”
Is that why I always want to do something? Do more?
Is this suffering?
Maybe it is, in some existential sense — the way artists and creatives suffer from egocentric philosophical contemplation, rather than an absence of true, basic needs. (I don’t mean to pretend those are the same thing.)
I’m hesitant to think that wanting is suffering. There are many things I want — even things I cannot have — that don’t make me suffer. I chalk most of my suffering up to cognitive dissonance. You know, the tension we feel when we try to hold to contradicting ideas. Let me explain:
On the one hand, I live the life I always dreamed of. I could spend the rest of my morning in this coffee shop, writing a list of things in my life to be grateful for. But…
But.
I dream of helping people, the way I used to, back when I was a therapist. I dream of guiding people to find sources of passion, like when I was a professor. My life is beautiful, but it still has holes in it. I am many of the things I wish to be, but I am not everything wish to be. So I look at those holes and…I want. I desire.
Then become those things, a little voice in my head tells me. The same voice in my head that told me to become a doctor, or to take that trip to China, or to get a bunch of dope tattoos.
But when I look at my calendar, at the endless blocks of dinner dates, painting classes, exercise blocks, not to mention my job; and I look at the ever-growing stack of books I mean to read; and the manuscripts of books I’ve written but not yet published; I have to ask myself: with what time?
I read books while I walk to work, for fuck’s sake. I walk around with my nose in a book like a capital-n Nerd from an early 2000s movie. Because when else am I supposed to find the time?
I want more. I want more fulfillment. I want more time. I want more holes in my life to be filled by beautiful things. But there’s nothing I’m willing to sacrifice for it.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve learned to know when something is enough. When someone is enough. When I, in all my shortcomings, am enough. It took some learning, but I got there. I don’t expect perfection anymore.
But when do those lessons translate to the greater lens of my existence? When does all of this (imagine me, sitting in my usual coffee shop, gesturing around at my greater life) make me think, “I could not possibly want any more.”
Maybe this is suffering. Maybe a more content person would look around this little coffee shop and say, “This is enough.” And that person wouldn’t be staring at their calendar, wondering if they could possibly pick up an adjunct teaching position at a local community college.
Maybe this is suffering — you know, the privileged, artistic kind. In which case, I suppose it’s not all so bad. I’ve got people in my corner.
“The discipline of suffering […]“ the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far.”
You tell ‘em, Nietzsche. I might be suffering, but I’m not just suffering; I’m driving the enhancement of humanity, one little dissonant cognition at a time.
And…well, I guess that’s enough for me.
